Enterprise Performance Management - Data is First Priority

 Original Blog post - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-ii-prashant-mendki Procurement transformation journey is complex, cross functional, time consuming and even frustrating at times. The very basic but a strategic step to start this journey is “Spend Analysis”. Again – this has to be done in a right way to get the potential benefits. We talked about that in first part of this article https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/journey-procurement-transformation-begins-part-i-prashant-mendki By definition – Spend Analysis is an analysis of your spend (invoice paid), what items you are spending on (product), who you are paying to (supplier). It looks really simple – no? When I worked with one of the large Media Entertainment company few years back, they had thousands of suppliers, millions of transactions, good amount of Maverick spend. It’s a global business with more than $2Bn in Spend, 12 different global systems. Thousands of trans...

In the weeks since SAP wrapped up its acquisition of Ariba, there has been a lot of discussion about how the Ariba products and technologies will be delivered to the SAP installed base. There was some information announced at the SAPPHIRE NOW conference in Madrid, but SAP users want to know more. To help us better understand this, I recently spoke with Prashant Mendki, a consultant and SAP mentor ( @pmendki ) specializing in procurement. Following is a transcript of our interview. What have you heard from SAP procurement users since the acquisition of Ariba was announced? Have they been enthusiastic, cautious, surprised, not surprised? As with many large mergers, the users I heard from were cautious. SAP and Ariba were competitors in the procurement market – especially in a supplier network area – so most of the users are looking for information on what will be done in areas of functionality overlap and products that offer the same or similar functionality. There a...